Question

I am writing a huffman code in C++ and I am now taking data from the files and have encountered a snag. One the first line I have a string of characters that I want to take as a string, which I didn’t find hard at all to do. But then I have to take the next x amount of lines of numbers and take them as unsigned chars so I can use them.

What would I type in if I wanted to extract this form a file?

ILaILbILrILcLd (want to take as a string)

3 (the 3 is the number of #s below it)

89 (want to take these 3 out as unsigned chars

207

88

Answer 1

As Nike tells us, just do it:

// read the line:
std::string line1; 
std::getline(infile, line1);

// read the int:
int num;
infile >> num;
// probably want to sanity check `num` here

// define a place to store the chars
std::vector<char> chars;

// read the chars.
for (i=0; i<num; i++) {
    unsigned int temp;
    infile >> temp;
    chars.push_back(static_cast<unsigned char>(temp));
}

It probably won’t accomplish much under the circumstances, but right after the definition of chars, you could add: chars.reserve(num); to avoid reallocation of the vectors memory.